Today I'm wrapping up my streak of talking about tricks/creature enhancements with Enthusiastic Study. I'll definitely be talking about at least one more in the future (looking at you, Fortifying Draught), but that won't be for a bit still. 1/x
ALSA of 7.51 in Bo3, making it the second-lowest-drafted learn spell, only above First Day of Class. Though, judging by the Card Evaluation Metagame graph, that data might be a bit outdated from being an average; Study is now roughly tied for third among red commons. 2/x
Even judging from the higher recent numbers, I still think Study is underrated. I think it is clearly the third best red common, and possibly even better than Pigment Storm. I believe this for the same reason I think First Day of Class might be fourth: learn/lesson is busted. 3/x
So as always, let's start with some baseline comparisons. A recent one is Run Amok, but the differences between 3 vs 2 mana, +1 vs +3 toughness, and learn vs not are all huge. A much better comparison is Wild Hunger: same base effect and cost, with an extra card attached. 4/x
So how does this card play out? Well, the +1 toughness is small enough that you can't rely on it as a combat trick to save your creature in combat, though sometimes it will. Instead, its use is to punish double blocks, enable chump attacks/blocks, and push damage. 5/x
A gut reaction might be that a trick that doesn't save your creature is bad. But it's better to frame Study as not just a standard trick; you don't need it to save your creature when it doesn't cost a card. Think back to Rimrock Knight, which is another good comparison. 6/x
The best home for Study is in Lorehold aggro. Not only does that deck already often want tricks to push damage on the ground, Study plays particularly well with its gameplan. You often have burst turns with magecraft, and Study's trample helps a lot then against chumps. 7/x
Plus, Study plays well with a lot of Lorehold cards. There's the aforementioned magecraft, with Lumimancer, First-Year, and Pledgemage. The latter is especially good with Study, since first strike means Pledgemage often survives despite the low toughness boost. 8/x
And, of course, there's Twinscroll Shaman, the best non-rare pair with Study. 4/3 double strike trample will win basically every combat, and push a lot of damage on the way. But it's worth noting that usually I'm playing Twinscrolls *because* I have Studies, not vice versa. 9/x
But also, Study plays well with the grindier Lorehold 2/1s: Historian and Pilgrim. Both give value from the graveyard, so it's really nice to trade them off, and 5/2 trades up well. And Study can help them do so, acting as a pseudo-Bone Splinters that draws a card on blocks. 10/x
Study is fine in aggressive Prismari decks too, but it's a bit awkward. There's tension between casting it pre-combat to get magecraft triggers for Pledgemage and Apprentice, vs after blocks for trick value. And your other creatures often fly, so aren't blocked often. 11/x
Finally, as I mentioned above, it can have a place even in control decks as a removal spell on blocks. It helps expendable creatures like Pests and Pilgrims trade with real threats, while not spending a card. Still not ideal, but it can play a role, and is learn. 12/x
I'm not going to go over all the good things that come with learn, since I think everyone knows that by now. But I will close by nodding to just how good Study is closing the last few points with its trample: if you're at 3, Study almost always kills you. 13/x
Conclusion: Enthusiastic Study looks like a combat trick, but plays out much differently, helping you trade up and push damage while also learning to not cost a card. It doesn't need to save your creature to be worth it. 14/14
Was talking on Discord a bit about why I think the UW tap deck failed design-wise this format, and figured I'd translate my points here.
So, here's a thread: 1/x
It's pretty clear by now that the UW tap archetype just isn't working in WOE.
UW is the worst color pair in WOE on 17lands - just barely above 50% winrate, which is atrocious, same as LTR scry elves.
I think the reasons for this are actually quite interesting. 2/x
1. The simplest reason is just that blue and white are the two worst colors in WOE.
Every set has color imbalances, this set happens to have those converge on UW being weak. The card quality just isn't there, the commons just not as deep as Jund. 3/x
Bit of a different kind of "underrated card" thread today. I usually don't do rares, and one could reasonably argue that this card is actually mostly *overrated*.
But today, I want to focus on why and how 17lands stats dramatically underrate the card Invasion of Kaldheim.
1/x
As a rare that gets picked a lot higher than I take it (3.14 ALSA in Bo3!), I don't have that much experience actually playing with the card. But it reads pretty strong to me, and has seemed impressive when I've cast it.
So why does it have a whopping *48.8%* GIH WR in Bo1?
2/x
Having a GIH WR below 50% is really bad - by this metric, Invasion of Kaldheim is the 19th worst card in the set, in the vicinity of unsupported buildarounds like Kaheera, Dina, Theros, and Arcavios. If you were drafting purely based on GIH WR, you would never pick it.
As promised, underrated card threads! First up: Urn of Godfire.
I expected this card to be completely unplayable, but recently I've been trying it a lot, and have honestly been impressed.
It's not great overall, but I hope to show where and how to use it in this thread. 1/15
Urn is currently the 10th least-picked card on 17lands in Bo1 (12th in Bo3), with ALSA 8.62 (8.35 in Bo3). Its pick rate seems to be staying roughly even in both Bo1 and Bo3.
So where is Urn good? Well, one of the more obvious use cases is as a bad hard removal spell.
1+6 mana is a lot to remove something, but with a lot of bombs in the set, it can sometimes be quite important to have actual hard removal in your deck.
Thinking of doing underrated card threads again for this set, probably going to try for 2-3 times a week for a bit, and see how it goes?
But first I figure I should talk about Seed of Hope, which was very underrated, but is likely moving towards overrated as people hype it. 1/7
At some point Seed of Hope was the least-picked green common by ALSA, while having something like a 60ish% GIH WR in Bo1.
But after a bunch of content creators have been talking it up, this is no longer the case - it's quickly trending up in ALSA, and down to 56% GIH WR. 2/7
So how good is Seed of Hope? Well, if it didn't have the clause about permanents, it would be like a Consider that gains 2 life (with small differences like being able to bin the second card), which is great! Consider is solid but unexciting in limited, and 2 life is huge. 3/7
Okay I should be asleep right now but instead I did a bit more digging, and it's possible I'm missing something, but it seems that 17lands data contains an exhaustive list of all possible sets of commons in Arena packs of DMU, and that this list is surprisingly small. 1/7
So basically I took the 17lands DMU draft dataset I've been using (which is a bit old, but still has 251,574 drafts), and looked at, for each common, how many different sets of commons it appeared with. And it turns out that the answer is always between 2998 and 3000. 2/7
With about 100 commons, and 10 commons per pack, we can expect each common to show up 25k times, so if the possible sets of commons each show up equally, we'd expect to see each one about 8-9 times. 3/7